Searching for information is one of the most prevalent activities on the Internet. Individuals increasingly use search engines that show lists of web sites potentially related to topics of interest. However, finding relevant information is difficult, because it is difficult for individual users and conventional search engines to identify relevant content among the enormous volume of accessible data. Further, most substantive content is not readily accessible, because the content is stored in databases that are used to dynamically generate documents and other data instead of being stored as static files. To access database content, a query string is typically specified in a URL that also identifies a network address of the database, so that the specific database to be searched for the desired content is identified in the query. URLs with query strings frequently become very long and complex. As the complexity of database driven Web sites has increased, it has become highly unlikely that a typical user will correctly type a URL and a query string to access content of possible interest on even a known Web site.
Similarly, secondary users of the Internet, such as conventional search engines and dynamic web crawlers, are often set up to avoid links that include URLs with a query string. Consequently, a large amount of the most valuable and substantive information that is available is not reported. To counteract this problem, some Web sites have been designed specifically for Web crawlers and search engines instead of for individual users. To ensure that their content is indeed identified in search results, such Web sites may use “cloaked URLs” to present different Web pages to Web crawlers than they do to individuals using browser programs to explore the Web sites. These Web sites detect when a request is from a Web crawler and redirect the request to a Web page that is specifically designed to maximize a search ranking in the reported search results, rather than to provide the page that a user would view in a browser. However, many search engine operators disapprove of this practice of cloaking URLs. Search engine operators try to ensure that their search engines return lists of Web pages that would actually be seen by their customers, if the customers were browsing the Web sites represented in the lists. Search engines are thus frequently set up to consider cloaked URLs as a form of spam and to make special efforts to eliminate cloaked URLs from their search results.
Another approach used to identify and access information on database driven Web sites evaluates a user's keywords, and attempts to match those keywords to a relevant search engine that is closely tied to one or a few database driven Web sites. This approach is sometimes discussed in terms of mining the “deep Web” or the “invisible Web.” Based on the keywords, a query string is created, which is syntactically valid for a selected search engine that is closely tied to one or more relevant databases. This preprocessing approach of selecting relevant Web sites and creating custom queries for their corresponding database(s) provides an alternative to using a conventional, “all-purpose” search engine, such as GOOGLE™, ALTAVISTA™, etc. However, it would be preferable to utilize these conventional, all-purpose search engines to find the desired content in databases on the Web, because the conventional search engines are so widely used. Thus, it is preferable to provide a way for Web site operators to make their database content accessible and searchable using conventional search engines and Web crawlers. It is further desirable to enable users to search database content directly from a browser when the user already knows one or more database driven Web sites that likely contain relevant information.